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Rendaku

Rendaku(連濁, lit. "sequential voicing") is a phenomenon in Japanesemorphophonology that governs the voicing of the initial consonant of the non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word. In modern Japanese, rendaku is common but at times unpredictable, with certain words unaffected by it.

While kanji do not indicate rendaku, they are marked in kana with dakuten (voicing mark).

In some cases, rendaku varies depending on syntax. For instance, the suffix tōri(〜通り, "road, following"), from tōru(通る, "to go, to follow"), is pronounced as -tōri(〜とおり) following the perfective verb tense, as in omotta-tōri(思った通り, "as I thought"), but is pronounced as -dōri(〜どおり, with rendaku) when following a noun, as in yotei-dōri(予定通り, "as planned, according to schedule") or, semantically differently – more concretely – Muromachi-dōri(室町通, "Muromachi Street").

Lyman's Law states that there can be no more than one voiced obstruent (a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow) within a morpheme.[2] Therefore, no rendaku can occur if the second element contains a voiced obstruent. This is considered to be one of the most fundamental of the rules governing rendaku.

Despite a number of rules which have been formulated to help explain the distribution of the effect of rendaku, there still remain many examples of words in which rendaku manifests in ways currently unpredictable. Some instances are linked with a lexical property as noted above but others may obey laws yet to be discovered. Rendaku thus remains partially unpredictable, sometimes presenting a problem even to native speakers, particularly in Japanese names, where rendaku occurs or fails to occur often without obvious cause. In many cases, an identically written name may either have or not have rendaku, depending on the person. For example, 中田 may be read in a number of ways, including both Nakata and Nakada.